Tales of Neverland

As Michael Jackson's PR manager, Bob Jones saw it all, from fabricated illnesses to pleas for a knighthood. But it was only when he was fired abruptly after 17 years in the job that he decided to tell his story. Dan Glaister meets him

Friday 9 September 2005 05.14 EDT
First published on Friday 9 September 2005 05.14 EDT

Bob Jones hands me an envelope and sits back in his chair. "This shows how far he will go," he says with a laugh, his gravelly voice booming out across the bustling Creole restaurant in south Los Angeles. "It's like the time he instituted an all-out campaign to try to get Elizabeth to knight him. These are ideas that he comes up with."

Jones should know. For 17 years the Motown veteran ran Michael Jackson's public relations, steering him from Bad to Dangerous and beyond, navigating the accusations and allegations that have plagued the past decade of the singer's career, before being unceremoniously dismissed in June last year.

Now, in the spirit of the times, Jones has written a book, Michael Jackson: the Man Behind the Mask. Ghosted by journalist and one-time Jackson family friend Stacy Brown, it covers familiar ground - the marriages, the surgery, the special friends, the money - but the piece of paper Jones has given me covers something that isn't in the book.

In 1984 a young White House counsel, John Roberts, today President Bush's nomination to become the Chief Justice of the United States, wrote a memo in response to a request from Jackson that President Reagan send a letter telling him how great he was.

"The office of presidential correspondence is not yet an adjunct of Michael Jackson's PR firm," reads the memo. "Frankly, I find the obsequious attitude of some members of the White House staff toward Mr Jackson's attendants, and the fawning posture they would have the president of the United States adopt, more than a little embarrassing."

Ouch. The King of Pop's request was denied.

"That King of Pop shit," says Jones, stirring sugar into his iced tea. "I named him. I named him the King of Pop, Rock and Soul. He changed it just to the King of Pop."

Jones's proximity to the King, as he refers to him with considerable irony, provides the book with its unique selling point. Jones is there next to Jackson as the singer lip-synchs his way through much of a world tour; he is there as Jackson uses his favourite word for poor black people - "splaboos"; he is there as Jackson fakes illnesses and injuries to avoid performing, either because it is too tiresome, he has not bothered to rehearse, or because he is zonked out on prescription drugs.

Jones recounts one performance by the King at the Soul Train Music Awards. Pleading a broken ankle, Jackson performed from a chair. As soon as he reached home with his 12-year-old friend, Jackson tossed his crutches aside.

In the publicist's view, Jackson, as that anecdote suggests, was far from a victim. Instead, he orchestrated the leaks to the press about Jackson's chimpanzee Bubbles, about the hyperbaric sleeping chamber, about whatever eccentricity that made Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, more interesting, more mysterious.

"I saw a mad genius in Michael Jackson," Jones writes. "Someone who toyed with people, someone who loved and cared only for himself. I saw a master of self-promotion and a self-destructive multi-millionaire spending millions trying to buy friendships and favours."

Jones wrote the book, he says, because he was pissed off. And broke. Principally broke. For, while he never signed a confidentiality clause, an alarming oversight on the part of Jackson and his managers, Jones's goodbye after 24 years working on and off for Jackson came at the hands of a messenger. A note bearing the photocopied signature of Jackson was handed to Jones. "Your services have been appreciated," it read. "We're going in a different direction, we no longer need you, good luck in your future."

Jones was left with no income and no pension, not even the holiday pay he was owed. But he took care of that.

"I do feel that I was owed a bit more than to have to go to the state of California to get my vacation pay," he says.

The book has brought a muted condemnation from inside the gates of Neverland, with Jackson's brother Jermaine issuing an email in June promising to take legal action. None has been forthcoming.

In the outside world, the book sold well on publication in America, boosted by Jackson's trial earlier this year, Jones's proximity to the singer and his own testimony at the trial. Oh, and it's stocked in the true crime section of US high-street bookshops.

The request for a knighthood, says Jones, came at the height of the 1993 child molestation allegations brought against Jackson by Jordan Chandler.

"I guess his feeling was it would go away," says Jones. "If they made allegations against him and now all of a sudden Queen Elizabeth decides to knight him, that shows them, I'm bigger than all of them."

Jackson even called on the good offices of another regal Brit, Elizabeth Taylor, to intercede with Her Majesty, says Jones. "We went to Elizabeth. She had very close ties to the Queen but she didn't do a damn thing."

Sadly for Jackson, the petition came to nothing, and he settled out-of-court with Chandler for a reported $23m (£13m).

Jones met Jackson in 1969 when the boy was about to be introduced to the world as the lead singer of the Jackson Five. "He was just a little boy," says Jones. "The first night I met him was at a party at a place called the Daisy at Beverly Hills. Diana Ross hosted it. Motown [which had signed the group earlier that year] was getting ready to launch them. Everyone, all of Hollywood, was in attendance. Of course, they took Hollywood by storm. They were excellent. They had worked the chitlin' circuit [a network of black-owned music clubs]. They had worked that circuit and [Jackson] had watched James Brown and emulated James Brown very, very well. While we put out the release saying he was nine years old, I think he was actually 12 at the time. That was all part of the PR game."

In the mid-70s the Jacksons left Motown and Jones stayed, remaining on good terms with the family, and watching the bizarre tales of the strange pop star emanate from Neverland.

In 1987, Jackson asked Jones to take over the singer's PR. Jones agreed, signing a two-year contract which was left to run for nearly 17 years.

It wasn't until 1989 and the European leg of the Bad tour that Jones realised there was something genuinely untoward about the singer. "We were in Paris and we're going to the Louvre and the paparazzi is there on motorbikes following," says Jones. "We got to the Louvre and he got out of a bus hand-holding one of these little boys."

Alarmed at the implications for Jackson's image, Jones challenged the singer, to be told that he didn't care.

"I told his manager, I said you're going to get into trouble, this can't happen. And I also told the attorneys and the business manager. These attorneys and the manager making all this money, I guess they thought I was some kind of fool trying to buck the system."

Jones seems wary and angry, a little embarrassed at the indignity of doing the promotional rounds for a book trashing the man he spent most of his working life defending.

Despite the sense of grievance, there is still a fierce loyalty to Jackson, or at least to the notion of what Jackson might have been.

"Michael's bigger than Elvis Presley. Elvis didn't write any music," he says. "Elvis sang and did what the Colonel [Parker] told him to do. He is the biggest thing black that the world has ever known. We were received by kings and queens as a head of state. And then, all of a sudden, allegations."

Despite all his work to create a myth as the Peter Pan King of Pop, says Jones, people will only remember Michael Jackson for one thing. "He damaged whatever legacy he has. When people think of him now, they think of molestation."

· Michael Jackson: the Man Behind the Mask, by Bob Jones, is published by Select Books.